Sister Vanilla is the discontinuous project of Linda Reid, sister of two of the members of the cult alternative pop-rock band The Jesus & Mary Chain, who joined in her only long recording to date. Published in 2005 with the definitive title 'Little Pop Rock', sounded quite similar to her brothers' band but with the added attractive counterpoint of her peculiar female voice. The name of the project is due to the childhood nickname she received from her brothers.

'Time' was a compilation of the Matador label collecting some of the most significant songs related to the musician, actor, poet, writer, artist, critic and punk pioneer Richard Hell. The cover reflected in detail a tattoo that television host Paula Yates wore in tribute to Richard, who was her lover for a while. She covered the tattoo when she married Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof, but questioned about Hell, she said he was very important in her life because, among other things, was an early teacher in the loving arts. But it also coincided with a time when Hell, in addition to participating in the prevailing politoxicomania, was addicted to heroin. It seems Yates has a fixation for singers, for she left Geldof for the ill-fated INXS singer.

Moe Tucker is known as the drummer of The Velvet Underground in wich, with a simple drum set of two timbales and no cymbals, she played standing up. After the dissolution of the band she collaborated punctually with her ex-bandmates, Lou Reed and John Cale, in addition to appear as guest feature on other recordings, and recorded a handful of solo albums, with highlights like 'Life in Exile After Abdication' (1989), where Sonic Youth's Kim and Thurston participated, or 'I Spent a Week There The Other Night' from 1991. Retired from music her late link with ultraconservative political movements caused some controversy.

lunes, 10 de diciembre de 2018

"We toured with Iggy on his Idiot Tour. He was great. He’s such a sweet guy. And the whole Bowie connection was a huge deal to us. Bowie was playing piano in the background on that tour. Everybody knew he was there, but it was very generous. He really loved Iggy. The performances were great. When we got to Detroit, it was complete mayhem. People were just taking their clothes off – leather jackets and cameras and shit like that – and throwing them onstage. It was amazing. We learned a lot on that tour. They were super professional and Bowie gave pointers to Debbie about how to work the stage in three sections – “Go left, right and center. It was interesting."

Sylvia Morales met Lou Reed in the year this photo with her friend Anya Phillips (designer, partner in crime with musician James Chance and founder of the Mudd club) was taken. Sylvia and Lou married with the beginning of the next decade and separated in 1994. In all those years she was his counselor, manager and artistic director. And judging by her statements, she had to fight continuously with record companies to personallly have the control over the cover art for those records. Here are some of them commented by her in an interview for Please Kill Me.

STREET HASSLE (1978)

Oh yeah. That was during a period when Lou said, “That was when I looked good.” As far as that album, right before The Bells, I had nothing to do with assembling that one except choosing the picture. He had brought stuff to me, and he liked that picture, of all the options. The manner in which it was set up, I had some influence on that. Despite having past experience that maybe should have given him a clue, there were always things getting messed up with the artwork, as far as permissions, or the manner in which things were used, etc., going back even to the first Velvet Underground album, and that kind of ridiculous legal issue with the Eric Emerson image that delayed it. That kind of thing kept happening until I developed a way of working where I was engaged from the very beginning of the process. It happened again on (1978), because he’d seen that artist’s work in a magazine or something, and it turned out years later that the guy who claimed the work was not in fact the artist who had done the work. That’s a weird story that I don’t have much info on.

[...] that Bells cover was a Charlie Chaplin reference. The B&W, the movie makeup look. He was watching a lot of movies around then. He had a lot of complaints about the business, and how things were handled with his work, the way the albums looked. So right around then I just figured, ‘well, maybe the cover should look like this, maybe try this’. But then also that’s when I found out about the limitations the record companies put on things like the artwork. Unless you were in the one-percent of artists who really make money for the label, you wouldn’t get much of a budget. And you’d get pushed into the room with, well, probably good people with good intentions, but people who were sort of churning out stuff just to get it done, really awful stuff.

But as far as my experience, I was just a talented kid. I won one of those national art contest things, and I got a nice award. I was in Hawaii at the time. I knew I wanted to go to New York, so I just applied to two or three schools. I chose Pratt Institute first because they gave me some money first. I met a lot of great artists, and saw a lot of art, and I was confident in my opinions. If something looked like garbage, I would say so. And Lou was really receptive to that. He was a person who was extremely bright. For example, there was the music he really loved – the ‘50s doo-wop, Al Green, Otis Redding, a very intense love for that that remained his entire life. But in the same vein, he happens to be in New York in one of these crucible moments with Warhol and all that, it was a sea change. And it focused his mind on really looking at stuff.

Unfortunately, as I said, we were bringing these ideas to these in-house art directors who couldn’t be more bored and didn’t have a lot of feeling for it. So, we did end up with a couple things… well, I look back at some of those covers and I think, ‘wow, they’re really funny looking.’ Because there’s a concept that we brought, but then they rushed it or whatever. And that’s when I realized, if you have a concept, you really have to do it from beginning to end and have control over it. And you know, how it connects to the music and lyrics, everything.

Yes, that was extremely intentional, a direct, thought out, and conscious use of that Mick Rock Transformer cover. It was ironic to me that some people back then were saying, “Oh, he can’t even bother to come up with a new album cover,” because, yes, he did! It was both an homage and a commentary on Lou at that moment. The word “blue” has significance. It used to refer to like a blue movie – something raunchy, risqué, unseemly.

And then the color blue – though we never really got it exactly right how we wanted it – the art department was a little baffled by it. But it turned out good.

It dawned on me that on most of these album covers, it’s just Lou’s face mostly, and obviously they’re going to put Lou Reed on the cover of a Lou Reed album. But also, it always conveyed a kind of solitude or loneliness. And here’s this song where he is explicitly out by himself, and it sounds kind of free. But of course, bottoming out means kind of hitting a low point

This helmet has those little black thingies on them that held the visor. And I put his name in those. And that was considered very outrageous to do that with the lettering. The label didn’t want to do it.

They thought it was just odd. But now Daft Punk definitely credited that cover for that Random Access Memories album a few years ago. But that’s my handwriting with the title, and those are my gloves. It was yet another reference to a mask, another kind of mask that Lou wore.

Oh yes, a lot of that, and listening to music from the jukeboxes. We’d ride out in the wilds of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, near where I had a home. A beautiful place, and he treasured it. That’s the home he’s standing in front of on the back cover.

He had the most amazing video game collection. I only wish I had hung onto it. He had the original Ping-Pong game. He was really good at it. He was also totally into pinball, and when we married, for our reception – the first part was at a friend’s fabulous restaurant, and then the second part was at the Broadway Arcade. Our friend Steve had the whole arcade closed for us. Gigantic baskets of quarters, people running around like mad and playing for hours and hours. It was great fun. We had four pinball games in our house.
Yeah, that New Sensations cover. For all our collaborations up to that point, that was the first one I really liked and thought, “Ah, now I’m getting it.” But the record company does not necessarily want to hear from the artist’s wife, as I found out in depth later, as I became more and more into the role of manager. So for the first time, Lou really just did not listen to the record company, and I knew to be very specific. And they started to call me, and that was how I got more of what we intended on that cover.

[...]We’d been working with the photographer Waring Abbott, and I think I pointed Spencer toward Warring, or Spencer pointed me towards him. Spencer is still involved with the New York scene, but Waring has sort of disappeared. I‘ve been trying to locate him, as he has some lovely photos of Lou and I that I’ve been trying to get my hands on. So anyway, there was this photographer who we’d admired a lot, and there was this photo, I think it was called “Big Al’s Street Gang” – or at least the French version of that. [Brassaï] The picture is very evocative of Paris street life and these ne’er-do-wells. And we wanted to sort of refer to that for the New York cover, and it was very hard to do.

I titled that album, which I am proud of, but was very hard, because Lou thought it was presumptuous. I told him, for many, many other artists it would be too presumptuous to name their album that. I said, when we call it that, reviewers will have to say, “Lou Reed’s New York, and I enjoyed that tremendously. But he said, “No, that’s pretentious, presumptuous. Who am I to say that?” But I convinced him, and everyone else immediately understood it. It also helped to define the moment. I think he was really letting go and had a lot of stuff to say. I think there had been this stance for a really long time in the kind of underground scene or whatever, like, I’m too cool to get involved or have an opinion about the small meanderings of things like politicians, who cares. But he just let all that go and let loose, and that’s what all came out of that album. I thought it was pretty amazing. There was all this blast of opinion and noticing that things were at stake.

And the graffiti on the wall, yeah, that was an inspiration. My dear friend Charlie Ahearn did that film. And if you were a little younger, you’d remember there was the initial beginnings, the Last Poets and other things, and there was a connection from that to what the young kids were starting to do, that hip-hop flavor, and it was intense social commentary. And when I heard that first Run-DMC album, I was knocked out, and insisted that we ask them to open a show. I think that was 1985, maybe a little earlier. It was kind of hilarious. It was in the Capital Theater, and they were so brave, because they were used to something else entirely, as far as a venue to perform. And it was the first time they performed in front of a very white audience, and they were trying to do their call and response, and there was nothing coming back. Man, they had to have guts! And then within about a year and a half, they were huge, and everybody wanted them to open. It was really exciting.

I worked with the Warner Bros.in-house people, and that was a really nice experience. And what I brought to it was that it should be velvet, that nice black velvet was easy to associate with mourning [for Andy Warhol]. So the special limited packaging was a real velvet package. We were actually nominated for a Grammy for that one, so that was nice.

Oblique Strategies is an artistic system created in the 1970s by musician and producer Brian Eno (Roxy Music) and artist Peter Smichdt. Eno, as inspired by a previous Schmidt project, used to come out with the use of loose written ideas that could motivate and spur the creative process. Later both collected some of those ideas in a deck of cards and subsequently started to edit it in different versions. The challenge of the resulting game is to use the cards randomly and apply the sentences. At some point it has served for, among others, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, U2 or R.E.M., but it has also generated a sort of trend of suspicious creative methods.